SolarWinds Service Desk Updates and Enhancements: MS Teams, Slack, Unused software (Updated: 27-NOV-2022)

November is a big month for new features and enhancements to SolarWinds® Service Desk. For a complete list, please visit the SolarWinds Service Desk release notes.

Increased collaboration tools integrations and new capabilities and conveniences for users

New to Service Desk is Slack integration. Now you can connect SolarWinds Service Desk to your organization’s Slack and Teams channels providing more flexibility by meeting employees where they prefer to communicate. Both Slack and Teams integrations enable users to open, view and resolve tickets and both Slack and Teams enable users add categories and sub-categories. Users can also directly include comments and attachments to tickets created in Teams and Sack to add additional information on their issue or request. Due to a limitation with Microsoft Teams, SWSD does not currently support adding an attachment to tickets created via Microsoft Teams. Additional information is available on the Microsoft website. For tickets created in Slack, adding attachments is not yet available in all regions.

Bring clarity to ticket automations with rules description field

Automation rules provide a powerful, yet easy way to trigger actions or escalation points. When a Create New Ticket automation executes you can now populate the newly incorporated Incident Description Field directly from the automation. Including a descriptive characterization via the automation rule improves the issue documentation process, reducing time to resolution.

Improve your management of uninstalled applications

Over time, businesses can accumulate upwards of 1,000 applications that are no longer installed on any computers in the organization. Now in a single operation you can remove all software records with zero installs from SolarWinds Service Desk, simplifying operations and improving productivity.

Parents
  • Happy to see the Description field available when creating new Incidents from automation rules! Is there any chance that we could have access to a {{Description}} variable in that field that would allow us to grab the description of the object that triggered the automation?

    Currently you can access the title, category/subcategory, requester, etc. and having the description available from the triggering object could solve some problems for our team right now. 



Comment
  • Happy to see the Description field available when creating new Incidents from automation rules! Is there any chance that we could have access to a {{Description}} variable in that field that would allow us to grab the description of the object that triggered the automation?

    Currently you can access the title, category/subcategory, requester, etc. and having the description available from the triggering object could solve some problems for our team right now. 



Children
  • Yes, we can look into supporting more replacements vars/attributes. Can you please describe the use case? Is the goal to create a "child" incident for a new incident of a certain type (e.g., using an action of Create Record)?

  • Yeah, exactly. For example, say a new Incident is created from a specific requester with a specific string in the title. We have some workflows where we need to create "child" tickets for other teams based on that original Incident.

    Currently we can access the title, category, requester, etc. of the original Incident using the variables provided in the 'Create Record' dialog, and it would be extremely helpful to be able to grab the description from the original Incident so we can populate that into the new "child" Incident as well. 

Thwack - Symbolize TM, R, and C